Category: Art-Photos

Grab any post for several years and this way and that way through the blog it’s going to be photos. Up top in the menu I have entry points according to tags for specific series. But not all the photos are up there in tagged series. Some are muddling around, kind of tagged, but not a part of any series. Diving in here and just about anywhere you’re likely to come across some of those forlorn ones.

At the High Museum. Looking around the internet there appear to be several of these sculptures. One at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is from 1869. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has another from 1860. How many are there? The marble is supposed to be of Cleopatra contemplating her suicide, and perhaps that is a reason that a breast is conspicuously uncovered, the story being that she died of an asp bite to her breast. Though she is supposed to be contemplating her suicide, it was only from one stance, her left side, that I was able to get an angle that looked even vaguely suggestive of an individual not simply meditating on dishes which are sitting in the kitchen sink after a satisfying dinner or a new pair of shoes that make her feet hurt, which is odd to me. What I saw in the sculpture, which led me to give it the dark treatment I have, was a forerunner of Hollywood silent film epics. And the pose and the drapery is lovely. But, though I have read her described as “severe”, this Cleopatra seems nearly absent of expression. In her mood I comprehend neither loss or gain, grief or satisfaction.